SoylentNews
SoylentNews is people
https://soylentnews.org/

hubie writes:

Distillation involves heating a liquid until it boils, then condensing and collecting the vapors that come off the liquid. When distilling ethanol, the process is fundamentally limited such that the maximum concentration of alcohol is around 95-percent. A new method has been developed whereby gold-silica nanoparticles are added to the liquid and it is illuminated from above. The photons are either absorbed by the nanoparticles and the particles heat up, or they scatter and strike other nanoparticles. This causes local heating near the liquid surface, which drives off the volatile, such as ethanol. With this method, ethanol concentrations can reach 99-percent.

And could light be used to distil hooch? 'We've joked about this in the lab,' says Halas. 'But rather than moonshine it would of course have to be called sunshine!'

Original Submission

1. "hubie" - https://soylentnews.org/~hubie/
2. "A new method" - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/move-over-moonshine-here-comes-sunshine/
3. "gold-silica nanoparticles are added to the liquid" - http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b02804
4. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=10866

printed from SoylentNews, Distillation Using Light Instead of Heat on 2024-04-25 19:49:20